SCAD Graduate Presents "Cash Crop"

For the Mason Murer Fine Art gallery of Atlanta, exhibiting the work of MFA students is tradition. Placing the work of a student in the museum’s primary display is not. But owner Mark Karelson seems to believe that the work of SCAD graduate Stephen Hayes is worth a break from tradition. This summer, visitors to the gallery will be greeted by Hayes’ installation “Cash Crop” the moment they walk in the door.

“Greeted” might not be the appropriate word to use here. Hayes’ arrangement of 15 life-sized, concrete figures is moving, awe-inspiring and totemic— but perhaps not welcoming. Each naked figure is manacled to an oblong, charred wooden structure, resembling, as one article noted, “a cross between a boat and a tombstone.”

Nothing could be more fitting, as the back of each wooden sculpture is carved with the floor plan of the British slave ship, Brookes. The famous image diagrams how 452 slaves could be packed head-to-toe onto the lower deck of the ship in order to maximize efficiency and profit.

Hayes, both a printmaker and sculptor, completed the display by covering the walls with prints of the diagram and covering the floor with rusty chains and hooks. Overall, the scene captures the overwhelming inhumanity and barbarism of slavery so effectively that an AJC article equated it to “a punch in the gut.”

To emphasize the emotional impact of the exhibit, Hayes’ figures are highly personalized models of men, women and children, casted from molds of the artist’s own family and friends. As Catherine Fox reported for the AJC, “[the figures’] particularity, emphasized by their placement each in their own boat, accentuates the dehumanization inherent in the plan and, of course, slavery.”

The exhibition is set to run through Aug. 10, 2010. To read the entire article, click here.